Sound Advice: Audio for Interviews (page 2)

In setting up a sound recording system, the objective is to provide clean, easily edited tracks. To do this, you can choose to record one track or two, and each approach has multiple sub-options.
If you're using the modern interview style that seems like a subject monologue rather than a Q&A session, you can mike the interviewee only. The off-mike interviewer will still be audible enough for reference during editing. (For tips on interview approaches, check out the July 2000 issue of Videomaker, page 102.)
If you want high-quality recordings of both parties, you may wish to place a mike between them on a stand or fishpole boom; or, budget permitting, mike them separately and use a production mixer to balance input levels.
For the greatest possible flexibility, you'll want to lay the two audio streams on separate tracks. One way to do this is by feeding each mono mike to one channel of a stereo input. That way, you get separate tracks synced to a single video.
In a classroom or similar setup, you may be shooting with a separate camcorder covering each party. That can solve two problems at once. Both participants have separate mikes permanently optimized to record them and each audio is recorded on a separate track.

After you've selected the mikes, placed them for good pickup, and recorded them for flexible editing, the final chore is to monitor and control audio quality.
First of all, use good headphones of the studio type that exclude outside sounds. You wouldn't capture video without ever looking through a viewfinder, would you? Headphones are viewfinders for the ears and every bit as important.
As you listen through those phones, check for the glitches that commonly afflict audio tracks:

• Background sounds A low, constant rumble of traffic may be acceptable, but when a police car howls by in Code 3, the siren wail automatically ruins the track at that point. Stop shooting and redo the passage when quiet returns.
  
• Auto level spikes Most camcorders maintain audio level automatically. In quiet passages, they may crank the gain in search of a signal. When full-volume speaking resumes, the delay in reducing volume produces a second of bad over-modulation. If you can't ride gain manually, get in the habit of beginning a brand new segment with a throwaway to give the auto gain control a level: "Well then, (brief pause) What did you do next?" Of course, you'll razor out the first two words in post.
  
• Poor mike technique Listen for audible "pops" made by plosive syllables blasted straight into the mike and correct mike, and/or subject position to lose them. With stand or boom mikes, watch out for the kind of people who move or turn away from the mike so that their audio quality varies constantly.
  
• Step-ons Listen carefully to the ends of interviewee statements to ensure that they conclude cleanly, without overlapping the next question.

Nothing is more frustrating than trying to doctor bad audio in postproduction. If you follow the tips in this article and invest a little in some external microphones and perhaps even a mixer, you'll be on your way to getting great interview audio.

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